Plenty of movies get the label of “passion project” hung around their neck, but few have encapsulated the term better than The Evil Within, even if it ended up releasing under the most ironically tragic of circumstances.
The brainchild of heir to an oil fortune, businessman, and philanthropist, and hobbyist filmmaker Andrew Getty, the member of the titular dynasty sunk millions of dollars of his own money into the project, but he couldn’t ever be accused of working particularly quickly given that production started in 2002, and he would die 13 years later at the age of 47 with the film still incomplete.
Inspired by his own childhood nightmares and shot largely within the confines of his own palatial home, the story sees a lonely boy with mental problems make friends with a haunting reflection in an antique mirror, with the creature naturally insisting its new BFF embark on a murder spree to kill everyone he loves.
For years up until his passing, Getty continued to tinker with The Evil Within, but the coloring and editing wasn’t even close to being finished when he shuffled off this mortal plane. His producer ended up stepping in to take up the mantle, with the end product finally being sent out into the world in early 2017.
While reviews were generally mixed across the board, The Evil Within did manage to rustle up a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score of 100 percent, with every single response on the aggregation site a positive one. More than two decades after Getty embarked on his venture, streaming subscribers have finally been won over by its charms.
Per FlixPatrol, The Evil Within has spooked up a spot on the iTunes global charts, and if anything, the story of what it took to bring to the screen is infinitely more interesting that anything unfolds during the 98-minute running time, which isn’t really worth a decade and a half of waiting.